With the ongoing Ritual flame fest at the other domain, personal motives bubble to the surface. The band's rep has alluded several times to two central ideals: popularity and money. These motives, the processing within the musician, must influence if not essentially shape the artistic or entertainment output the individual offers us. Can a producer of work reveal for everyone, via third party analysis or interrogation, an objective quality of their output? I'm seeing it for myself as a non-participant.

Thrash, like late punk and all rock music, was often thick with lefty humanism.

Sepultura, Testament, Napalm Death, Obituary are among the big offenders. Contrast with Bolt Thrower's war anthems with war as an eternal place, or as a god that summons hapless mankind to engage with it. Metal is a sacred place for awe, not a platform for sniveling.

Causation: fertility and immigration increases numbers, thus increasing the side effects that come about. In other words diversity amplifies itself over time.Symptom: diversity as a symptom of the unbinding of a society's unity and loss of direction.

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The problem with this is that you tout NASA as some shining example of Northern European solidarity but ignore more glaring historical examples like the fractious pettiness of the Holy Roman Empire or late medieval France (not as strong as an example, but the point stands), whose constituent peoples' cultural kinship was closer than Americans to Germans.

Okay, you're giving an example of diversity playing a major role in dissolving unity and direction. Diversity isn't singularly reducible to kinship.

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I don't think demographics have as big a role to play in fostering (an imposed) unity of purpose or what have you.

Similarly, even if you take into account the sometimes privileged backgrounds of the Romantic artists, you will see that it was fundamentally a socialist movement closely related to the arts and crafts ideals of workers as artisans and not labourers.

A worker caste should be artisans looking to excel for love of their craft, not scrape by in resentment paycheck to paycheck. What need is there for keeping dedicated lumpenprole labor? If man should make anything, let it be excellence, never mediocre. Let machines mass produce a few simple things like drainage pipes or ditch excavation; they're soulless anyway.

Turbo was a hard rock experiment for them. It wasn't half bad as such, but it certainly wasn't a metal album by any measure.

For their day, Screaming For Vengeance and Defenders of the Faith were rivaled only by Iron Maiden's Piece Of Mind and Powerslave and to an extent also Ozzy and Dio's releases. The mid-late eighties were the end of heavy metal's dominion and the rise of death metal. The change was in the air around 1986 and fully realized within the next couple years. The old metal heads at the time split into hard rockers adrift who didn't get it and the fewer dedicated Hessians who did.

No shit there needs to be some degree of cultural common ground for humans to work together functionally but a society's success isn't reducible to its ethnic homogeneity or diversity and citing Apollo 11 doesn't really say anything other than that American rocket scientists borrowed a German dude's notes.

Nobody has reduced failure to diversity. Diversity splits a civilization's interests into different directions, where before it was one. One of these directions is commerce as an apolitical engine that overtakes cultures because it consumes everyone's time and energy, yet also encourages foreigners to join in as traders, buyers or labor. This creates a cycle doesn't it? So, diversity is like one of the larger gears turning in the wrong direction, not really like a minor static component.

This is taken for granted but there's a defeaning silence when it comes to listing examples.

No, the examples have been given exhaustively. There is a chronic problem of intellectual fraud in that people are given their "proof" and soon after deny that they were given any proof. This isn't the way to win your challenge - it's the way to approach people in bad faith.

Another well worn example: the German-American foundation and greatest achievements of NASA. These are people of like kind coming together in an original, pioneering effort to build and explore things that were previously unknown to mankind. This isn't a unique example of such a feat in history. Shall we move on to the Chinese or proceed with the Indo-Europeans? You know what? Do your own homework.

Does anyone actually take history classes and if so actually read the books anymore? Christ on a twig, this is how we get huge crowds of people believing Cleopatra was a charcoal Nubian rather than a Seleucid / Macedonian.

This is taken for granted but there's a defeaning silence when it comes to listing examples. What sort of achieviements? Which societies? Given all the material conditions present at the point that a state apparatus breaks down, can you reliably refer to its multi-ethnic composition as a leading cause?

It's both symptomatic and causation of fail in every case where diversity existed.

The illicit global economy, a 28 minute video. How globalism has been the catalyst for booming deviant economies: arms, drugs, slaves, money laundering, etc. How crackdowns on this activity drives its adaptation, innovation and proliferation (crackdowns on crime accelerate the decay of liberal democratic states). How these non-state criminal actors are gaining power outside the bounds of the international community's legitimate structure. How notions of Western Progress is the past and non-state criminal actors of the developing world are our future.

Hence, with the exception of Epicureanism, which Neoplatonism dreaded as its mortal enemy, every important system of former times was drawn upon by the new philosophy. But we should not on that account call Neoplatonism an eclectic system in the usual sense of the word. For in the first place, it had one pervading and all-predominating interest, the religious; and in the second place, it introduced into philosophy a new supreme principle, the super-rational, or the super-essential. This principle should not be identified with the “Ideas” of Plato or the “Form” of Aristotle. For as Zeller rightly says: “In Plato and Aristotle the distinction of the sensuous and the intelligible is the strongest expression for belief in the truth of thought; it is only sensuous perception and sensuous existence whose relative falsehood they presuppose; but of a higher stage of spiritual life lying beyond idea and thought, there is no mention. In Neoplatonism, on the other hand, it is just this super-rational element which is regarded as the final goal of all effort, and the highest ground of all existence; the knowledge gained by thought is only an intermediate stage between sensuous perception and the super-rational intuition; the intelligible forms are not that which is highest and last, but only the media by which the influences of the formless original essence are communicated to the world. This view therefore presupposes not merely doubt of the reality of sensuous existence and sensuous notions, but absolute doubt, aspiration beyond all reality. The highest intelligible is not that which constitutes the real content of thought, but only that which is presupposed and earnestly desired by man as the unknowable ground of his thought.” Neoplatonism recognised that a religious ethic can be built neither on sense-perception nor on knowledge gained by the understanding, and that it cannot be justified by these; it therefore broke both with intellectual ethics and with utilitarian morality. But for that very reason, having as it were parted with perception and understanding in relation to the ascertaining of the highest truth, it was compelled to seek for a new world and a new function in the human spirit, in order to ascertain the existence of what it desired, and to comprehend and describe that of which it had ascertained the existence. But man cannot transcend his psychological endowment. An iron ring incloses him. He who does not allow his thought to be determined by experience falls a prey to fancy, that is thought which cannot be suppressed assumes a mythological aspect: superstition takes the place of reason, dull gazing at something incomprehensible is regarded as the highest goal of the spirit’s efforts, and every conscious activity of the spirit is subordinated to visionary conditions artificially brought about. But that every conceit may not be allowed to assert itself, the gradual exploration of every region of knowledge according to every method of acquiring it, is demanded as a preliminary—the Neoplatonists did not make matters easy for themselves,—and a new and mighty principle is set up which is to bridle fancy, viz., the authority of a sure tradition. This authority must be superhuman, otherwise it would not come under consideration; it must therefore be divine. On divine disclosures, that is revelations, must rest both the highest super-rational region of knowledge and the possibility of knowledge itself. In a word, the philosophy which Neoplatonism represents, whose final interest is the religious, and whose highest object is the super-rational, must be a philosophy of revelation.

What they're saying is it is our doom to never comprehend the pure essence of being, ultimate truth, beyond ourselves. We can't. We can only believe it is there and in believing we set forth in striving toward it. Stop believing in this pure essence out there beyond us and declension to relativism, atomism, nothingness, evil and ignorance overtakes us. The above quote also belongs to the religion and relativism threads.

Meth manufacture adapts to and overcomes society's struggle against it.

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But now drug users are making their own meth in small batches using a faster, cheaper and much simpler method with ingredients that can be carried in a knapsack and mixed on the run. The "shake-and-bake" approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine &#151; an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.

Those in the media who are celebrating this “victory” are enjoying a dubious at best moment of triumph: they still have not addressed the problem of which piracy is a symptom, or affirmed a sense of fair play (”morality”) in the eyes of the media-buying public.